Richard Okumoto recounts his mother’s life story in this memoir spanning the mid-1920s to the turn of the 21st century in Southern California.

Due to her parents’ financial struggles, Okumoto’s mother Tome is adopted by relatives at age 3, moving 50 miles away. Despite a lack of contact with her birth parents, Tome enjoys her youth as an “all-American farm girl.” But two years after graduating high school, she numbers among the over 100,000 Japanese Americans interred in the U.S. during WWII.

Realizing then that her appearance would always mark her as a perpetual foreigner, despite her U.S. citizenship, she more fully embraces Japanese culture while incarcerated in Arizona’s Gila River Camp. She weds another detainee during her time there and has two daughters. After the family’s release in 1945, they eventually settle in Los Angeles, where Tome later bears two sons, including the author. When an auto accident disables her husband, Tome struggles to make ends meet while cleaning houses.

Throughout her years, Tome imparts to the author the importance of ikigai, having a purpose in life. Her purpose is to care for her family and instill moral values, a mission that sustains her. Likewise, Okumoto feels he’s fulfilling his ikigai in writing her story, which is narrated from Tome’s perspective, aided by journals she left him upon her death in 2004 and his own letters.

Okumoto poignantly expresses Tome’s profound disillusionment that Japanese Americans were “disdained as visual immigrants” during the war. He creates an authentic voice for his mother, believable and poignant, including illuminating details that bring the period alive. After war is declared on Japan, for example, she notes: “Confusion, posted signs saying NO JAPS, broken windows, and people screaming obscenities fill what was once a serene landscape.”

Providing keen insight into the Japanese-American experience, American Jap Girl is a compelling memoir that portrays the psychological scars borne of poverty and prejudice and the underscores the importance of purpose and resilience.

BlueInk Heads-Up: This worthy addition to the cultural record of Japanese-American life will be of particular interest to West Coast libraries and Japanese-American communities